`Nixon' portrays disgraced leader with sympathy

May 12, 2006|By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic

It was the most indelible made-for-television event of its time.

Viewers gathered around millions of TV sets the world over on that historic day in 1972 to watch Air Force One touch down in Beijing. Out of the plane stepped the leader of the free world. While the cameras zoomed in for close-ups of President Richard Nixon, his famous five o'clock shadow pulled into a tight smile, he shook hands with Chinese Communist leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. As live political theater, the event had no parallels then, and few today.

Fifteen years after that breakthrough collision of East and West, an unlikely opera was born.

John Adams' first stage work, "Nixon in China," with a libretto by Alice Goodman and direction by Peter Sellars, took the opera world by storm at its premiere by the Houston Grand Opera. Some critics derided it as "CNN opera." Others likened Goodman's spare, poetic libretto to a smart-aleck college skit. Few were quite prepared for a theatrical portrait of the disgraced, often caricatured, president as a sympathetic and even tragic figure. Adams and his collaborators had dared to give Tricky Dick, along with his Chinese counterparts and their wives, an inner life.

Although "Nixon" remains the composer's best-known opera and has been staged through the world, it has taken its sweet time to make it to Chicago.

Next week, the work will receive its belated local premiere to conclude Chicago Opera Theater's spring season at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park. The production will be led by COT resident conductor Alexander Platt and directed by Kevin Newbury, who's reviving the original James Robinson staging. Sharing the production are companies in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Portland and elsewhere.

"Nixon" was the first of several Adams operas to turn momentous American political, moral and social issues into grand myth. His latest such work, "Doctor Atomic," about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the birth of the nuclear age, had an equally controversial premiere last fall in San Francisco and will arrive at Lyric Opera in 2007-08. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer said he's not bothered that listeners react in different ways to his music when they first hear it.

"You realize it's very hard to make a judgment about the value or longevity of a work on first encounter," he said by phone from his studio, located deep in the fog-shrouded Mendocino woods of Northern California. "Works of art are always a hard sell. They take a long time to settle in, especially if they are complex and have intrinsic merit."

Adams confesses that although he's written more technically advanced music since "Nixon," he retains a special fondness for his luminous, shimmering score, which draws on the pulsing, burbling rhythmic repetitions of minimalist composer Philip Glass. "Every time I hear it, I just get a little tickle of pleasure," adds Adams. "It's exciting to know an opera I've written nearly 20 years ago has become part of the American cultural experience."

The opera looks far more kindly on Richard Nixon than did political pundits during the Watergate-obsessed final months of his presidency and in 1987 when "Nixon in China" burst on the scene, according to Robinson.

Nixon--portrayed in the COT production by company veteran Robert Orth--"is actually set up in the opera as a very sympathetic character," said the director. "It's so easy to demonize him, but we wanted to humanize him as much as possible. He actually was a very savvy, culturally astute guy, a pioneer who gleefully broke new ground in U.S. foreign relations."

Robinson, who is artistic director of Opera Colorado, admits he was a bit nervous about staging the opera anew, particularly since the Houston production has taken on near-iconic status all over the globe.

"However, because that production is almost 20 years old--as is the piece--my design colleagues and I felt it was time to have another look at it. The music has so much movement and color in it, and it seemed to be a much more kinetic piece than I remembered from the original production. So we decided to make it a little more theatrical, a little less realistic."

With that in mind, Robinson and his design team--Allen Moyer, James Schuette, Paul Palazzo, Wendall K. Harrington--fill the stage with television consoles showing actual home movies shot by members of the U.S. delegation accompanying Richard, wife Pat Nixon (sung by Maria Kanyova) and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Kyle Albertson) to China. We see a typical American family watching the Nixons' trip at home over their TV dinners, enthralled by the blue glow of their television screen.

Adams, who is just completing his fourth and final residency at the Northwestern University School of Music as the first recipient of the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Musical Composition, says he's pleased to be among the opening-night throng at the Harris Theater.

"It's a different take on the piece from Peter's [Sellars] production," says the composer. "I am anxious for there to be other points of view for my operas other than his. If these works are going to have a real future, they have to be taken up by different directors."